


Ghosts

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: Captain America (2011)
Genre: Angst, Dreams, F/M, M/M, Post-Film
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-11
Updated: 2012-04-11
Packaged: 2017-11-03 10:36:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/380447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve dreamed in ice and wakes up in light; now he has ghosts to face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghosts

The brilliance of light against the warmth is the first thing he notices, pressing against his face. He thinks it must be someone’s hands, because it’s foreign at first, but no one touches his face, not since his mother, really.

~~~~~

It’s a memory, a hot-sweaty memory of summer boiling down on Brooklyn. The boys kick up the dust in the street, bare-footed and uncaring, caps on crooked or not on at all, ears and foreheads baking red, but Steve still feels cold, colder than he’s ever felt. He’s catcher, because the catcher doesn’t run as much, for both teams because his asthma is acting up again.

Bucky is sitting on first base, which should be a clear indication of how the game is going. His legs, suddenly longer from one minute to the next because of a growth spurt, are stretched out, open side, knees bent. “Come on,” he whines, drawing out the _n_ as long as he can, “hit the ball, it’s not that hard!”

Charlie Parker chokes up on the bat and barks, “Shut your pie-hole, Barnes!”

“I’m going to _die_ here on first, even Steve could hit this,” he pauses and adds, hastily, “no offense, buddy-“

“None taken,” Steve replies, his voice slightly flat.

“-but hit the ball, Parker, hit it, hit it, hit it-“ Bucky almost chants, and of course, Charlie misses, and Bucky groans. “You could hit it if you kept your _eyes_ open, you greaseball!”

Charlie drops the bat and pushes his sleeves up and _flings_ himself at Bucky, who twists and scrabbles off the copy of _Great Expectations_ that’s serving as first base, and Charlie hits his front teeth against the edge of the book. Suddenly there’s a riot; boys jumping to help Charlie, boys going to ring Bucky, yelling something about a fight, and Steve is pushing himself between layers and layers of bodies and despite the sun and the sweat and the press of teenagers he’s still cold, colder than he’s ever felt.

~~~~

“What do you remember dreaming about?”

Steve’s therapist is a nice lady, and he’s aware that she’s trying her best, and a part of him wants to acknowledge that – the part of him that still insists he’s a good man, the part that Erskine wanted to badly to amplify – but he doesn’t really want to answer her. “There’s a lot of things,” he says, trying not to let the bitterness pierce his tone, but it’s hard. “I don’t recall all of them,” he adds after a moment, and it’s not exactly a lie, enough of not a lie that Steve can say it and not feel too much guilt.

“The more you talk about this, the sooner-“

“The sooner I can get back into the world?” Steve says, and he knows it’s harsh when it comes out of his mouth. He doesn’t want to hurt her feelings, but he’s suddenly worried he did, and the apology is automatic.

“You don’t need to apologize to me,” she tells him softly, and pulls a diary out from her desk. She hands it to Steve, along with a box of pencils. “Tell you what,” she begins, like they’re friends, “why don’t you write down what you think, and you can figure out what you’d like to share with me.”

Steve takes the pencils like they’re made of gold – Fury has him on suicide watch, which is dumb, because Steve would _never_ , he can hear Peggy’s voice and Bucky’s voice overlapping in his head, telling him how stupid and selfish that is – so he’s not really allowed a lot of things, especially things that could be fashioned into a weapon, which is apparently most anything when you’re Captain America. Some days he wants to argue with them that it’s not fair, that they’re both gone, he should be selfish, but he can’t, at the end of the day.

“I’m not really a writer,” he says.

“Then draw it,” she replies, curling his hands around the pencils and the diary.

~~~~~

There aren’t many smiles in the war. Bucky does it less and less, but Peggy does it more and more, and even then they’re still rare slivers of light. Her lips, perfectly polished to a red shine curve up and Steve thinks of heat and sweat and skin, even as he’s cold, so cold. He touches her carefully, trying to be a gentleman, trying not to be proprietary. He thinks that if were a dame, he would hate that. To have some big goon of a man think he owned her just because she smiled at him.

She’s always just out of his reach, though, just brushing away from his fingertips. He doesn’t think it’s on purpose because she’s not a tease, but there are always things, meetings, bits of life that get in the way of this and at the same time he wishes there weren’t, he knows without this war there would be no them. This is not destiny’s call but something far crueler.

~~~~~

Steve draws until he can’t see straight and the book is full.

~~~~~

Bucky’s skin is rough, and cold, hands chapped and freezing in a way they’ve never been cold before. They’re running over the new skin of Steve’s new body in a way that is new and Steve wants to luxuriate in the feeling but he can’t. It’s wrong, it’s secret and wrong and Bucky’s hands are amazing even though his skin is rough like Peggy’s isn’t, his lips are harsh and demanding. It’s okay to be rough, to not hold back, because there isn’t a part of Bucky that Steve doesn’t know; he knows where all the scars are from, and the new ones he categorizes, he knows the inside of Bucky’s head like he knows the inside of his own or like he knows the streets of Brooklyn – so perfectly that he can predict how a car will travel down the street. He can map out Bucky’s thoughts as they appear on his face, even the ones that are new, the ones that are smiling now, half-lidded, pleased.

But the worst of it, beyond the shame of the pleasure and the shame of the act and the shame of joy that Steve feels is the shame that this never happened.

~~~~~

“You drew this man a lot,” is the second thing that his therapist says in their session, attended as faithfully as church by Steve’s mother, although he was bad at it after moving out of the orphanage. “Is this James Barnes?”

Steve looks up then, because the name is alien. _James Barnes_ would have protested, and the retort is on the tip of his tongue until he remembers that for her, James Buchanan Barnes is a name in a history book, a sniper whose biggest claim to fame was being the man that Captain America wouldn’t leave behind. Steve got a history book from one of the SHIELD agents, the kind he remembers from school, except fancier, with glossier photos, and he and Bucky have a couple of paragraphs.

Mostly it’s about him, though.

“Bucky,” Steve says, as though that clarifies everything. “No one called him James.”

“You miss him,” she says, and it’s not a question as she pages through it. Steve feels a squeeze of possessiveness, like maybe he shouldn’t have shown her the diary, but if he takes it away now the direction his heart is pointing will be obvious.

Steve’s never been good at deception, so he doesn’t answer her, just lets her flip through the pages.

“And this lady, she’s beautiful.”

Steve holds his breath as she puts her fingers over the sketches of Peggy, as she paws her way through his past. He saw them just a few weeks ago. A month ago, Bucky was alive and scowling his way through Europe and a few weeks ago Peggy taught him how to kiss like he was about to die, and now he’s here in a world he can’t understand and they’re both somewhere that he can’t find them.

Peggy, he supposes. Peggy might be alive, but the last hint of selfishness that he possesses doesn’t want to know if she lived a good life, if she married a good man or had children, or became a woman to be trifled with, a woman like his therapist. “Peggy,” he finally manages.

“Peggy Carter,” the therapist says, and she keeps paging her fingers through the book, taking possession of the life that Steve didn’t get to live.

~~~~~

Steve dreams that the coldest he’s ever been is the winter of 1934, and his asthma had kicked in something terrible in the middle of the night, the ice in the air clamping tight iron bands around his skinny ribcage. Bucky, so much bigger, already warmer, had slipped into his bed even though he shouldn’t have, even though Steve hated feeling weak and small and dainty even if he was all those things, and wrapped his arms around his best friend.

“Breathe.”

That’s what Steve does, he breathes, even though the bands of asthma are back, impossibly, he can’t do what Bucky is saying, and he’s colder, much colder. “Peggy,” he tries to say, but there isn’t a sound, and she’s kissing him for the first and last time, effervescent and bubbling and beautiful, and it’s _cold_.

~~~~

He only gets up because Bucky’s voice tells him it’s pathetic when a grown man lies in bed all day. He only runs his prescribed route around the compound because he remembers Peggy’s smile when he used to run around the camp in the morning. He only wraps the bandages around his fists because he remembers how Bucky taught him to do it, carefully but steadily. He only goes to his therapist because she wears the same color lipstick that Peggy did. He only keeps breathing because Bucky insisted on it every winter when his chest didn’t want to listen to his brain. It never listened to Steve, but always listened to Bucky.

~~~~

He hates this dream, but at least he understands the cold, because the train is hurtling along the track and the door blows itself open and Bucky flies out and Steve can’t catch him. His fingers slip out from between Steve’s each time, each time he reaches Bucky can’t reach back, the train betrays them both, the pit in his stomach is frozen and he wants to thrash but he can’t.

~~~~

“But don’t you want to learn about the world? I know you have a history book.”

“I don’t look at it,” Steve says carefully. “I only wanted to see what they said about me.” About Bucky, really.

“One of the Howling Commandos is still alive. I’m sure Morita would love to see you.” She dangles that, like a carrot. It hurts how much he wants to say yes, because Morita was his friend, but it hurts more that the rest of them have died and he doesn’t know how, he wasn’t there for it. It hurts most because she doesn’t dangle Peggy, when he knows she’s still alive too. He wonders if she realizes it would be going too far. “There are things of value in this world, too.”

“The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles,” he points out, and she looks at him blankly, and he shakes his head. “I’m not interested,” he explains.

“Who told you that the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles?” she asks suddenly.

He looks back at her and wonders if that was supposed to be confidential. _Don’t tell the iceman from the 40s anything about the world until you’ve cleared it with the higher-ups_ , he imagines her telling Fury.

He doesn’t want to get his source (a young, enthusiastic SHIELD agent who reminds him so much of himself that it hurts) in any kind of trouble, so he just sighs. She doesn’t reply. They sit there quietly for a few minutes. “Steve,” she says, “Eventually you’ll have to continue on with your life.” She says it so softly, he thinks that if he weren’t Captain America he wouldn’t be able to hear it. There is no judgment in her voice, just concern.

He doesn’t nod, because Bucky’s voice in his head is saying the same thing, and even Peggy is chiming in. Why won’t they leave him alone? The ghosts of people who he let down, the ghosts of an era bygone, the ghost of a Brooklyn forgotten and a time where a short skirt was two inches above the knee. Ghosts of people he loved.

“I thought I was going to die,” he finally says, and it’s the first time he’s admitted to it.

She just nods and moves in closer, and takes his hand in hers. Her hands are tiny, breakable. They’re not like Peggy’s hands, which were larger, with calluses on the fingers, but it’s the first human touch that Steve’s felt in a long time.

~~~~~

The light is warm and soft, like hands on his face. No one ever really touches his face. Peggy doesn’t because they aren’t that close, not yet, although Steve hopes that one day she will. Bucky doesn’t because they’re both men and it’s just not done, it’s not appropriate.

 

They’re there, behind his eyelids, and then he blinks, and they’re gone.


End file.
